New staff appraisal system in the works at SBI

State Bank of India employees will soon be given ratings as part of an appraisal system which is being revamped. This is part of an attempt to bring objectivity as well as differentiation in evaluation of performance.

Consultancy major Boston Consulting Group is advising India’s largest bank on developing a new career development system for its employees. SBI has about 2.25 lakh employees on its roles.

Called ‘Saksham’ and scheduled for launch on April 1, 2015, the new career development system is a draft under discussion and subject to changes based on feedback from employees.

The consultants identified productivity as a key challenge for the bank and have listed ‘key result areas,’ criteria on which a person will be evaluated for the year.

The new system proposes five types of grades (instead of marks on 100) divided into AAA, AA, A, B and C in the order of excellence.

Employees with similar work profile are to be compared with each other.

The new plan also seeks to address the lack of a formal career development system for the clerical staff.

Key result areas have been standardised across officers/clerical staff assigned with the tasks of similar nature (role).

Essentially, there are three roles in the new system: budgetary, measurable and non-measurable.

For all roles, 70 per cent of marks are based on ‘key result areas’ and 30 per cent on assessment by supervisor.

The draft says that the new system may also be used for rewarding high performers through monetary incentives, taking decisions on extension in service, and requests for transfers.

Significantly, it states that introduction of the revised system is ‘not meant to identify low performers’.

A monthly view will be taken on all budgetary and measurable roles.

This will result in publication of a monthly score on key result areas to get a view on performance.

There will be compulsory written mid-term review every half-year to assess performance and provide feedback.

A nine-month review will allow for specific and limited interventions on target-setting, based on decisions by the central management committee, if required.

The current Annual Appraisal Report Format was faulted mainly for not adequately differentiating one employee from the other in terms of performance. Of those assessed, as much as 80 per cent scored more than 90 marks.

The performance evaluation was completely subjective, too.

Neither was there any objective calculation of score. It also bristled with too many key result areas — as much as 40 for budgetary roles and 25-30 for non-budgetary roles.